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Sarah Palin addressed the Tea Party tonight in Nashville.  I guess the speech was vintage Palin, heavy on headlines, short on details.

I’m not a big Palin fan for a few reasons.  Although she understands that free markets are what have enabled the civilized world to create wealth, I don’t believe she understands the specifics of the economics behind it.  I also believe she’s too divisive an individual to gain broad national support.  I think the Republican party also needs someone who’s more moderate on social issues such as gay rights.

But she did her thing, to much applause.  Ten seconds after the speech was done, Bob Shrum on MSNBC called her a ‘merchant of hate.’  Thankfully Neal Boortz called him out on the air telling him to his face that he needs to take off his mic and go home because he just lost any credibility he ever had.

The Republicans need to find someone more moderate and more liked than Sarah Palin.  She has her role to fill, but I hope it’s not as one of the contenders for the 2012 Republican nomination.  I hope the tea party movement continues to grow however, because at its core is a huge disappointment in government for running this nation into financial ruin.

Best Palin line of the night, talking about the war on terror:

“To win that war we need a Commander-in-Chief and not a law professor standing at the lectern.”

Yesterday, Mikey and I spent the afternoon auditioning people for our upcoming short film.  It’s always a fun process.

We had an interesting conversation with one actor from Britain.  He said that in the U.K. to be considered an ‘actor,’ one had to have a drama degree and belong to various acting organizations.  Here in the U.S. you just need a headshot.

How true.  While the lack of constraints might make the American acting world more dynamic, it also allows for an enormous range in acting skill.  While there are some people that absolutely blow you away, there are others that are actors in name only.

But it’s an enormous amount of fun to have people come in and read your work.  Good actors bring a lot to each character.  It’s really cool to see how each one can bring something different…

This graph is from a great opine by former Dallas Fed Chief Economist W. Michael Cox which can be read in full HERE.

What it clearly shows is that capitalism is giving us more stuff on a continuous basis which I believe is a good thing:

I’ve been asked to screen ‘Valley of Angels’ at my alma mater’s annual video festival and give the keynote address.  It should be a blast.  I haven’t been to Ferris since ‘94.  It’ll be great to get back to see the campus and a few of my professors.

I’m really hoping all the snow melts by mid-April when I have to go though.  I fear those Michigan winters…

Barack Obama called for a health-care bill that would cost no more than $900 billion over ten years.  Whether or not a bill gets passed is uncertain at this point.  What bothers me is all this talk on television about how these obscene health-care bills would actually help the deficit problem.  I can’t understand why people keep falling for this  ‘Obama’ ideology – that you have to spend more money to save money.  It’s absurd.

What we know for sure is that the government almost always underestimates the costs of programs.  This isn’t surprising.  Politicians lie in order to get stuff passed.  I’m sure they’ve been doing it for millennia.  If a bill is claimed to cost $900 billion, we don’t know what it will cost, but we can almost be certain that it will be much more than $900 billion.

If the health-care bill goes down (in its current Senate or House form), we’ve probably saved several trillion dollars from being added to our national debt.  That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be health-care reform.  What we do need is health-care reform that saves us money, not reform that will sink us financially.

Here’s some selected cost-overruns as shown by a CATO bulletin which you can read in full HERE:

…that temporarily (let’s say a few hours), suppresses a person’s IQ.  Maybe a 50 point reduction would be fine.

I want to go see a movie today, but my choices range from ‘It’s Complicated’ to ‘When in Rome.’ If I could take a pill that would make me an idiot for a few hours, I could go to the theatre and be happy.

But I don’t think this pill exists.  So I’m going to have to find something else to do.  Maybe I’ll watch the news…no, I’d need a pill for that too.

The headlines today were:

“In $3.8 Trillion Budget, Obama Pivots to Trim Future Deficits” – NY Times

“Obama’s Budget Proposes $100-Billion Jobs Plan, Higher Taxes on Wealthy.  The $3.8 Trillion Package Also Includes More Education Spending and Measures to Control the Deficit” – LA Times

“Obama’s Budget Calls for Billions in New Spending” – Washington Post

Well, the newspapers were 1 for 3.  Here’s the real skinny on the President’s budget as shown at keithhennessey.com:

What we clearly see is that this budget submitted by the President spends even more than the budget he presented last year, both of which are greater than our historical averages.

Our budget deficits should never, EVER, get above 3% of GDP.  Obama is planning an 8.3% deficit for 2011, and 5% deficits for as far as the eye can see.

This is simply unsustainable.  And there’s no reason any rational human being would think that he’s not going to end up spending more than he suggests he would.

The fact that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, & Harry Reid will run deficits the likes of which have not been seen since WWII is not surprising.  The fact that the media spins this as deficit reduction is not surprising.  What would be surprising is if the American public lets them get away with this.

That is unless the public doesn’t mind sticking their children with debts they’ll never be able to repay.  I hope that’s not the case.  I’d like to think we’re not that selfish…

I’ve decided that my favorite force is the strong force.  Now I know what you’re thinking – you favor gravity, the weak force, or the electromagnetic force.  All good choices.  I like gravity just as much as the next guy, but my favorite force is the strong.

The strong force carries out two main purposes.  First, it binds quarks together to create protons and neutrons (2 up and 1 down in the case of a proton, and 1 up and 2 down in the case of the neutron) and some other particles as well.  Second, it binds those protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of an atom.

It’s pretty extraordinary if you think about it.  Protons want to do little else except repel away from each other.  But there just happens to be this invisible force that will ‘glue’ them together if they get close enough to each other and some neutrons.

The strong force is really strong.  In fact it’s about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as strong as gravity.  However, it diminishes very quickly with distance as you move away from the protons/neutrons in an atom’s nucleus.

So that’s cool.  There just happens to be this really strong force that holds nuclei together, and diminishes so fast that it isn’t allowed to do much else.  Imagine that.

Obviously without the strong force (which is mediated by the gluon, of all things), atoms would not exist and we would not exist as well.  So let’s hear it for the strong force!  Hip, hip horray!

The problem with almost every scary movie is lack of scariness.  A few times every generation a movie comes out that is actually pretty frightening.  A lot of them are bare-bones, independent movies that the studios didn’t have a chance to fuck up.  Seeing 1 out of 10,000 independent horror movies become successful because they’re truly frightening isn’t that amazing.  What is amazing is when a film can get through the Hollywood studio process and still come out as a truly effective piece of horror.

For the scariest movie of all time, those pieces just happened to all fall into place.

1. It was adapted from a novel so the studio couldn’t destroy the script too much.

2. The studio couldn’t get a famous young actress to play the lead because no one wanted to touch the material.

3. Famous actors the studio wanted (Brando, Nicholson, Keach, Fonda, MacClaine, Hepburn, Bancroft) for one reason or another were never attached.

4. Directors the studio wanted (Penn, Bogdanovich, Nichols, Boorman, Rydell) for one reason or another were never attached.

5. The actors and the director that were attached knocked the thing out of the park.

I watched ‘The Exorcist’ last night for the 3rd time I believe.  I’ve just always loved this movie because the gap between it and the 2nd scariest movie of all time (‘The Innocents’?) is huge and has remained for so long.  The fact that it’s a studio movie (made by the same studio I work for) makes it all the more amazing.

I especially love the pace.  In fact, every script I have ever written mimics its pacing.  The first act is long and confusing.  The second act starts bringing things together in awesome ways.  And the the third act (the priests don’t get involved with the demon until the last half hour of the two-hour movie) is non-stop excitement.

If you’ve never seen the original version of ‘The Exorcist,’ please rent it and watch it alone some night.  It’s about as good a film-watching experience as it gets…

…when I got home from work last night.  It’s amazing in this connected world how many options are removed from a person when their connection to the grid is severed.

I couldn’t:

1. Do the business that I had planned on doing, mainly emailing actors for my upcoming auditions.

2. Check my Ikariam game, an online browser game I play for bits of time throughout the day.

3. Play Modern Warfare 2.

4. Watch a movie at home, since I couldn’t stream from Netflix.

5. Work on my novel, since I use a browser-based wordprocessor.

6. Listen to LastFM, the music channel I listen to through my Xbox.

To make matters worse, there wasn’t anything good on The Science Channel.

I have to go bed early on Saturday nights because I wake up at 5:40am to go into work on Sunday.  So I don’t go out often on that night.  Normally I would have gone for a walk or went to the gym, but I had barely slept the night before since my gas heater had blown out in the middle of the night and I was too lazy to get up and re-light it.

So I played some Assassin’s Creed 2, and read a little on my Kindle before going to bed early.

I think the more connected we become, the more in danger we’ll be at some point of having nothing to do when we lose our connection.  At that point we’ll have to resort to old-school things like actually going outside…

The election night ratings:

Fox News Channel: 6.16 million viewers [1.9 million 25-54]

CNN: 1.5 million viewers [483,000 25-54]

MSNBC: 1.14 million viewers [387,000 25-54]

Glenn Gavin of The Miami Herald wrote a great analysis of the coverage which can be read in full HERE.

Here’s an excerpt:

Watching coverage of the Massachusetts senatorial election Tuesday night, I wondered if MSNBC was getting ready to cut off its cable signal to the state. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, positively enraged that Massachusetts dared to elect a Republican, delivered two hours of nonstop bilious rage toward the state’s voters, calling them “irrational” and “teabaggers,” engaged in “a total divorce from reality,” and hinting that they’re vicious racists to boot.

If you watched CNN or Fox News last night, you got a balanced analysis of how Republican Scott Brown pulled off the political upset of the century (or, if you prefer, how Democrat Martha Coakley blew a dead solid electoral lock). Yes, I said Fox News, without irony.

It may be too much to expect NBC, these days reduced to a national wisecrack, to be embarrassed over the frothing lunacy that passes for news coverage at corporate stepchild MSNBC.

Yesterday it was downpouring in Los Angeles.  My normal 1hr Thursday commute home was easily going to be 2 hours in the rain.  Or so I thought.

As I do every day before leaving work, I checked out Sigalert.com to see how badly traffic was gnarled up.  To my astonishment, traffic through downtown was actually moving!

I hopped on the freeway and as I was driving into downtown I kept waiting for the traffic to back up.  It never did.  As I approached one of the worst intersections in the history of mankind (the 110/5 interchange just north of downtown) I realized what was up.

The connector coming from the 110 to the 5 has been one lane for as long as I’ve been in Los Angeles.  The weird thing about it is there was always a second lane there to exit on, but it was blocked off with barricades for some reason.

After all these years, Caltrans finally opened up the second lane and put lights in the road to make sure people couldn’t change lanes near the exit.  This one bottleneck would back up traffic for miles every single day.  It was particularly bad because it was so close to downtown, where it exasperated the already heavy traffic problem.

Finally, an easy fix was made.

That’s the problem with government.  Even if a simple solution is in front of it, and even it the government finds that solution, it’ll often take years to get there.  And most of the time government not only will not find that solution, they’ll come up with one that makes the problem worse.

I am glad that Caltrans is finally making some improvements though.  A couple years ago they greatly improved the 405/101 interchange which had been the worst interchange in the nation for years.  Last year they widened the 405 on the west side and added a lane where it goes under the 10 (which was a horrible bottleneck).  So there’s at least improvements trickling in.

I’m guessing this extra lane going to the 5 should decrease my typical commute time from 1hr to 45 minutes.  That’s really something to be happy about…

This is a map of all the McDonald’s in the U.S.  It’s good proof that my home hood, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is one of the most rural parts of the country:

Editor-in-Chief

NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112

Dear NBC,

I was a long-time viewer of MSNBC until it was refocused to the far-left of the spectrum.  I used to enjoy watching its daytime news and the Chris Matthews show.

Then out-of-the-blue, the network became a non-stop infomercial for Barack Obama.  I simply couldn’t watch any more because it was less about the news and more about selling one particular politician.

Since then I’ve turned on MSNBC on occasion, and have been shocked every time.  During the Republican convention when Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann disgraced themselves and NBC by their deplorable behavior, I thought it was the low-point of all time for news in this country.  I had never seen such outright extreme bias by a news network in my entire life.

But yesterday when I turned on MSNBC to see the election coverage, I witnessed a new low.  Keith Olbermann said that he had to apologize for the following statement:

“In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

He then went on to say that he had to apologize because he hadn’t included the phrase ‘sexist.’

This is pure slander.  If NBC is in the business of slandering politicians they don’t agree with, I don’t have a legal issue with it.  I’m just a viewer who is absolutely disgusted by it.  I’m disgusted by all this extreme-left wing nonsense that has become synonymous with your network.

What in the hell happened to your network?  Where did the news go?  How long will it remain a non-stop political advertisement for the progressive movement?

You really messed up a good thing.  I hope one day you get back to the news (and fire Keith Olbermann).

Sincerely,

Jon Rosten

levelblue@sbcglobal.net

Yet another one grabbed from Carpe Diem, which encapsulates so much about the world.

What we see is that wealth is growing in both Europe and the USA.  But since the annual growth rate in the US is a percentage point or more higher, the gap between the two regions is growing.  We continue to grow faster because our economy is freer.

This is the real problem with modern socialism.  It robs wealth from future generations.  The farther you extrapolate out the growth curves, the more wealth is deleted.  What the leftist economic philosophy does is rob enormous amounts of wealth from future generations in order to redistribute a small amount of wealth today.

It is truly immoral.  However getting those who believe in it to understand the results so clearly shown above is nearly impossible.  It’s not something that’s easily felt…

Scott Brown (R) defeated Martha Coakley (D) 52% -47% tonight, handing Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans and breaking the Democrat’s super-majority grip on the Senate.  Wow.

This simply could not have been possible.  A Republican being elected to the Senate from Massachusetts?  A Republican who will kill the health-care initiative championed by Kennedy which was days away from passing into law?  A not-well-known Republican who would take the seat that Ted held for 47 years?

Wow.

The historical significance of this special election cannot be overstated.  It was the political upset of our generation.

But what’s going to be really interesting is to see how Obama adjusts after the independents of MA told him to basically go blow himself.  Will he pull a Clinton and fall on the sword, and re-adjust to the center?  Will he listen to the MSNBC cuckoo’s and shift to the extreme left?  Or will he continue to be a hard left liberal, trying to push legislation on a country whose population is 80% non-liberal?

Seeing what the Democrats do with the health-care legislation should give us a sense of where Obama is going to go.  Will they try reconciliation bills with hard-left provisions to advert a filibuster?  Will they try a more moderate bill that will attract some Republicans?  We’ll see.

Scott Brown’s ‘truck’ campaign was brilliant.  It’s not something that urban, liberal elites would understand.  In fact they seem to be mocking it.  But it is something that would resonate with the majority of America.

What a great night…

Keith Olbermann said the following last night on his show (talking of the Republican candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat):

“In short in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible homophobic racist reactionary ex-nude-model tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Today on MSNBC he apologized, saying that he forgot to include the term ’sexist.’

How can NBC allow this crazed lunatic to continue to slander people in such heinous ways?   It is unbelievable.  Olbermann is one of the most awful human beings the media has ever seen.  At this point NBC is a willing accomplish to his slander.  It’s one thing to be atrociously ignorant, as Olbermann is, but to be down-right immoral and heinous is another thing.  I guess that’s what NBC is going for.

“…with one poll showing a free-fall.” – Norah O’Donnell talking to Chris Matthews on Hardball tonight.  She said it with a straight face too.

I guess the clowns at the extreme left-wing network don’t even try to hide their lies any more.  I want to sell commercial time on MSNBC for companies who pitch products to the foolish.  It seems like a perfect fit.

I had to grab this from Carpe Diem as it’s just another jab at Krugman for putting Europe up on a pedestal for us to pray to.

We are much richer than Europe because we are economically more free.  As long as we remain more free, the economic gap between Europe and The United States will continue to grow.

I had the last few days off because I’ve been using comp days saved up from the holidays.  I had envisioned on taking a few days to do little but write and watch movies.  That hasn’t happened.  But I am recharging.

I’ve been going through hundreds of headshots today for a short that Mikey and I will be shooting soon.  Over the last few days, I’ve gone on a hike and several walks.  I’ve had a lot of Starbucks and relaxation hours.  I’ve also spent many hours watching The Science Channel.

I haven’t even taken the time to blog.  But man has it been good to rest up a bit…

‘Spring 2010′ is the release date of the first map pack for MW2.  I really like the maps that came with the game but if I had one complaint it’s that they’re all a bit too similar.  They’re good sized, mostly urban, dense, day-time maps, which are cool, but I want more diversity.

It’s definitely not Infinity Ward’s fault that these maps are getting a little stale.  The mileage racked up on them must be unbelievable.  Just on Xbox Live alone, there’s several hundred thousand people playing at any given moment around the 24 hour clock.  Any maps that any developer could possibly dream up would start getting old on this game after a couple months.

Here’s what I hope comes in the new map pack:

1. Night maps.  I don’t know what the hell happened with the night vision, but it sucks that these maps are all in the middle of the day.  There should be a couple at night and one or two at dawn or dusk.  Night time is fun!

2. Weather maps.  We need another Downpour-type map and one where it’s actually snowing (not just snow on the ground).

3. Tight maps.  How about Vacant II or Chinatown II?  Give us a couple where we have to use the SMG’s.

4. True Sniper maps.  One or two open maps like Overgrown would motivate people to start using the sniper rifles.

5. Heavy vegetation maps.  There could be a couple jungle maps like the ones from ‘Battlefield: Vietnam.’  The vegetation looks great now, and in the few patches where it’s heavy, the fighting is very fun.

6. Castle map!  One of my favorite maps of all time was ‘Counter-Strike’s’ Piranesi which was a castle and its grounds.  Castles naturally make great combat maps.  Let’s see one in MW2!

A few days ago, ultra-left-wing economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote one of the most ridiculous articles of recent memory, entitled “Learning from Europe,” which can be read in full HERE.  The ever-odd Krugman praises Europe as an “economic success.” After all, haven’t you visited Paris?

His fellow economists quickly had a field day with Krugman’s idiocy.  Mankiw HERE, Perry HERE, Cowen HERE.  My favorite was by a PhD student HERE.

Here’s the evidence which Krugman ignores:

Adjusting for price levels, here’s the GDP/capita of the U.S. and Europe’s five most populous countries:

United States 47,440
United Kingdom 36,358
Germany 35,539
France 34,205
Italy 30,631
Spain 30,589

If you compare the descendants of the various European regions who live in the U.S. with their relatives in the European homelands, the U.S. citizens are 58% more productive than their counterparts (see the chart that the PhD student put together HERE).

The EU15, if a state of the U.S., would be the 49th poorest state; France would be the 50th.

As the U.S. continues to grow a percentage point or two faster than Europe, as has been the case for a long time, the wealth gap will continue to grow.  Future generations of Americans will be far richer than Europeans.

There’s an inherent problem with the structure of the European economies.  Far too much capital is taken out of the free market where it would create wealth and is shifted to the governments where it does not.  There is a bright spot for Europe however, as countries are shifting to more efficient taxes like VAT’s, and away from taxes that heavily distort like income and corporate taxes.

Krugman is entirely wrong, as usual, as he continues to ignore the laws of economics and the data that we all can see.  Krugman’s blog is called ‘The Conscience of a Liberal” which is accurate.  It certainly isn’t “The Reasoning of an Economist.” For that we must rely on economists that still believe in the fundamental laws of supply and demand.

This is from the PhD student’s paper:

During the current recession, the US GDP fell by a 3.3%. Theoretically if the US adopts European policies and immediately decreases to the levels of EU15, its per capita GDP would fall by 26.5%, 8 times worse than The Great Recession!